Chatting over lunch with Marcella Hazan

We live in an era of food celebrities, but not one of legends. It’s hard to imagine anyone launching the sort of kitchen reinvention today that Marcella Hazan created when she brought true Italian cooking to America.

Hazan was surprised herself at the strange twists and turns of her life, she said during a stop in Seattle last week to promote her new memoir, “Amarcord: Marcella Remembers.”

She wasn’t, though, really talking about food. Before she was the Marcella of cookbooks and cooking schools, she was a scientist, a researcher, a war survivor — a person who never gave food much thought until Victor Hazan entered her life more than a half-century ago.

“When he was courting me, he was always talking about food, what he had for lunch, and what he wanted for dinner,” Hazan said over lunch last week.

“It was not very romantic.”

Had they not married — “It would have been a disaster!” Victor cheerfully broke in from across the table — she never would have discovered her own talents when it came to food, or her ability to transmit that knowledge. Her own interest in cooking began after Victor, her “lifelong collaborator and writing partner,” moved the family from Italy to Manhattan to join his father’s business, leaving her lonely and frightened in a new country.

Accustomed to the greengrocers and fishmongers of Europe, she had never seen a supermarket. The food “was dead, to me,” she said in her gravelly voice, words dry and direct, but so low and quiet a recorder barely caught them.

Dead?

“Packaged, like a coffin. Dead, dead, dead.”

Working alone in her home kitchen in those days, Hazan realized she had “an intuitive understanding” of how to recreate the dishes she had once enjoyed at home.

In the book, she wrote, “Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed; it came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak.” In years to come, it became her livelihood and then legend.

There are no recipes in the memoir. That’s a rarity in modern food books, but Hazan said they didn’t belong.

“I thought, it was not a cookbook, why put recipes in it? I put in things that affected my life and my career.”

She told the story, for instance, of her lame arm and the right hand she describes as “clawlike.” A broken arm at age six had led to gangrene, she wrote, and she barely escaped having the arm amputated, going through years in and out of the hospital and repeated operations.

“No one ever asks about my arm. Ever. I thought that was — I thought I won a type of battle. It was a fight,” she said last week.

When son Giuliano was born, she had to wonder “can I hold him properly or will I scratch him with my hand?” She had to learn to grip an apple so it wouldn’t slip away as she sliced into it.

“Let me tell you that I did not like to see myself on television,” she said.

The wartime years were a different sort of battle.

When people talk about the war, she said, “they never talk about what it was like for a teenager who tries to live through the war.” Gesturing at the lunch table, she said that her family never ate “like this,” facing the table. Instead they pointed their bodies toward the bomb shelter door, to save an extra second if they needed to run.

As a teen, “I didn’t have dreams, just to save my life. I had one thing I wanted to do. That was to study,” she said.

“The future was something like a dream. The past was another type of dream.”

Memories are strange, she said, and they didn’t come to her chronologically when she began setting them down. The process was, both Marcella and Victor said, something like living their lives over again. It wasn’t always smooth, as when they wrote how Victor left her in anger after she presented her thesis on the day she won her long-sought doctorate, dumping the roses he had brought her in a trash bin:

“What have I done wrong?” I said.
“If you don’t know there is no point in my explaining,” he said, a phrase I was to hear many times during the 53 years that followed.

“We told it like it is,” Victor said.

Marcella was forced to leave lab work after a short time in the U.S., faced with the combined pressures of her poor English, an ill husband, and the new baby. She did not miss the work, and noted that it was similar to cooking in many ways — though with one difference. A lab experiment can drag on for months with no resolution, she said, when cooking “after two or three hours work, you eat it and it is enjoyable.”

What she does miss is Italy, where she usually visits extended family and old friends yearly — but not this year. “It’s home,” she said. After years in Florida, she now misses New York, the city that once terrified her to the point that she refused to cross the busy street after a hairdresser’s appointment to wait for Victor at the Museum of Modern Art.

And, finally, she truly misses teaching. Officially “retired,” she does give casual lessons to a woman who helps her out in the kitchen when she entertains. She doesn’t need assistance at the stove, she said, but to help clear and clean after the guests leave at 11 p.m.

“I’m too old for that.”

Dining out on the bi-coastal tour, where she has drawn hundreds to her signings and aggravated her carpal tunnel syndrome (“Do they forget I am 84 1/2?” she said), she was looking for Asian food when it was time to eat, a favorite of hers and a tough specialty to find in their current home of Longboat Key, Fla. (We had lunch at Boom Noodle, where the Japanese and Japanese-inspired dishes won their approval.) Her career began, in fact, through taking lessons in Chinese cooking, when the teacher suggested she offer an Italian cooking class to fellow students. Quite a few aspects of Asian cooking, she said, are close in nature to Italian food.

Most people, said Victor, know better than to take Marcella out for Italian.

When she is served Italian food, “usually, I don’t like what they cook,” she acknowledged. It makes it awkward when the chefs ask how she enjoyed their efforts. “I say, ‘the lamb was very tender.’ Which was true.”

It’s hard, she said, to cook Italian for a restaurant-type crowd — possible, but hard.